Goodbye Specialized Modules?

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B has come out with a special issue devoted to the evolution of human cognition, especially language origins. The introductory essay appears to be available online to non-subscribers, so even if you don't have access to a science library you can check out that one. It takes an evolutionary psychology approach, so I am sympathetic although I lean toward a heretical skepticism about specialized modules. (Orthodox evolutionary psychology holds that we evolved a "large collection of computationally distinct 'modules.'" [p. 2093]) Naturally, therefore, I was happy to see this sentence, "… the 'massive modularity hypothesis' has long been the object of criticism and the articles in this theme issue represent the emerging alternative view of the evolved human mind."

The metaphor for the human mind in this alternative is the human hand. Instead of consisting of many specialized organs, the hand is a general purpose tool "capable of performing a wide and open-ended variety of technical and social functions." Frankly, it has long seemed obvious to me that the human mind is an open-ended, general-purpose tool and I have doubted the modularity view's ability to explain human history. Of course many things that seem obvious to me turn out to be wrong, but I need to have it shown to me that it's wrong. I'm not much moved by the a priori argument that modularity is the way the a computer has to handle the matter, so it must be the way the brain works.

The most important difference between my general approach and theirs is that they tend to assume that human cooperation is a result of our high intelligence, while I have come to believe the opposite. But if I only recommended papers that summarize my own opinions I would have very little to report. The August 5 issue of the Transactions is an important contribution to the study of human origins and I wanted to get out of my hammock long enough to urge giving it a peek. Click the link to the introduction to get an overview of what's happening these days

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Looks interesting. I would make the case that these domain-general modules are networked in a domain-specific manner . Here, natural selection favoured networks conducive for language processing, through the selection of fibre tracts or pathways, such as the arcuate fasciculus, rather than specific mental modules dedicated to certain types of linguistic processing (see: http://http://replicatedtypo.com/domain-general-regions-and-domain-specific-networks/2694.html)
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BLOGGER: Thanks for your smart comment

Thanks for drawing my attention to such an interesting paper. One thing you may have missed is that in the abstract of Cecilia's own paper “Grist and Mills: on the cultural origins of cultural learning” she observes that “I find that recent empirical work in comparative psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience provides surprisingly little evidence of genetic adaptation, and ample evidence of cultural adaptation.” This could suggest that she thinks that there is very little difference between biological mechanisms in the ape and human brains – despite having written in the main paper that “The genetically inherited cognitive-developmental mechanisms use computational processes that are also present in other animals, but they are uniquely powerful in their range, capacity and flexibility.” I must try and get a copy of the Grist paper – which is hidden behind a pay wall.

As a result of reading the main paper I have already published a detailed critique on my blog which points out that one of the general failings in the work reviewed is that if you are talking about evolution you need a clear view of both the starting point and the end point. What I see is that little is said about the biological information processing mechanisms at the animal starting point – and this apparent ignorance of the starting point has resulted in exaggerated claims for the supposedly far more powerful mechanisms at the human end point.